More details on first-round pick DeAndre Hopkins

Much like new teammate Andre Johnson, DeAndre Hopkins is a quiet guy. (Melissa Phillip /Chronicle)

We started at his mom’s house in Central, S.C., then moved to the first apartment in which DeAndre Hopkins lived, the first of many lawns on which he played football, and the rec league field where he’d show off for his cousins. As Hopkins pulled into the parking lot of his high school, he declared, “This is where I made history,” a more literally true statement than I knew. Daniel High School’s football field was torn down after Hopkins graduated and the school was rebuilt on top of it.

We stopped by “The Hill,” a piece of land the family has owned for decades, and the place Hopkins called the most important part of the whole tour. His uncle Dan arrived to say hello, holding a hand shovel he’d been using for gardening.

Next on the tour was Clemson. We went to the stadium, where Clemson quarterback Tajh Boyd and teammate Andre Ellington were getting in a workout. Then came the brick apartments where Clemson’s freshman athletes live, followed by the botanical gardens just down the street where his family used to hide Easter eggs when Hopkins was a kid.

Hopkins, who was the Texans’ first-round pick in the NFL draft, told me the idea of all he has overcome is blown out of proportion. I’m not so sure he’s right about that. But the fact that he thinks that way shows exactly why he got through it. Last week, I spent several hours with Hopkins, his older brother and two sisters, his mother, godmother, great uncle, cousin and high school coach. I had to leave a lot out of the story that ran in Sunday’s paper. So here are things I learned about Hopkins this week. Numbered, so they’re easier to follow. I’ll just stop when I run out.

1. Hopkins is a man of few words. He didn’t do many interviews throughout college. His junior year in high school, despite being a star on the team, he asked his coach if he could skip media interviews in deference to the seniors. And so when he had dinner with Andre Johnson the day after the Texans drafted him 27th overall, Hopkins saw some of himself in the veteran receiver.

“He’s cool,” Hopkins said. “He’s quiet though, kind of like me. I think we’ll get along. We’re not very loud people so when we talk, people pay attention.” I told him Johnson said he asked a lot of questions, which made Hopkins feel a little sheepish. “Yeah, I did. I just want to know basically everything he had to offer. I didn’t want to bug him.”

2. If it weren’t for Hopkins’ agent telling him the Texans were interested, he wouldn’t have known. The Rams worked him out twice before the draft so he knew they were interested. He said he didn’t spend any time with the Texans. Subterfuge.

3. Shortly before the draft, a report surfaced that the hotel room in which Hopkins and Rutgers receiver Mark Harrison stayed during the combine was left trashed in pretty disgusting fashion. Hopkins said on draft day that the Texans didn’t even ask him about it. He told me last week that his agent said the Texans called hotel security to figure out when he left the hotel. Hopkins said when he left the hotel room it was fine.

“The whole thing was strange,” Hopkins said. “The most important day of my life, I’ll be trashing a hotel room. Really? After all I’ve been through, really? Trash a hotel room. … Especially when you know you’re staying with someone, you’re extra secure about stuff.”

I asked if Hopkins thought Harrison did it.

“I don’t know, I left before him,” he said. “I was already packed and in my clothes he was still in his combine stuff. He didn’t take a shower yet or anything so who knows.”

4. My favorite quote about Hopkins came from his 15-year-old sister Shanterria Cobb. “He’s kind of weird,” she said. Then quickly, “In a good way.”
Said his older sister Kesha Smith: “He doesn’t watch sports much. Tournament’s going on, there’s basketball games, he’s like, ‘Oh, have you seen this one thing on the Discovery Channel?’ I’m like dude, there’s 10 seconds left and the game is tied, what are you talking about?”

5. Those of you who thought the nickname was “nuke,” like the short form of nuclear, instead of “Nuk” aren’t alone. Cobb thought that until recently, too.
Nuk is how the whole community knew him. Said his high school coach Randy Robinson called him a rec league legend and said, “I knew about Nuk before I ever met DeAndre Hopkins.”

6. Baseball was the first sport Hopkins played, when he was about 6. He was the only kid who could hit the ball out of the playing field, and he remembers adults standing in front of their cars to protect them from the dings.

7. He never said this exactly, but I think basketball might have been his first love.

Two weeks ago, Hopkins visited Robinson at the school and the two recalled the first time Robinson tried to pick up Hopkins for football practice. Having seen him play before, Robinson thought, “I’ve got Vince Young,” of the kid who had been a quarterback.
“He came to spring practices as a 9th grader, I’m all excited,” Robinson said. “… (His brother) Marcus jumps in the truck, ‘He ain’t coming, he ain’t playing.’ I go into the house, to the bedroom, I knock on the door, (Hopkins says), ‘I’m not playing football.'”

Said Hopkins’ cousin Javis Austin: “He wanted to be LeBron James.”

Hopkins wanted to be at a college where he could play basketball and football. He said Florida’s basketball program recruited him, but football wasn’t interested. He also got an offer from Wake Forest. At Clemson, he played basketball for a year before quitting to focus on football.

8. Sabrina Greenlee, Hopkins’ mother, is working on a book called I Am Living Proof that will detail the family’s history and her own. I touched on it briefly in my story. The first came before Hopkins was born, when his mother’s younger brother Russell Smith died in a car crash when Greenlee was 14. Eerily, two more passengers in that car died young, just not in that particular crash. Another passenger, Sabrina’s cousin Larry Greenlee, is a strength and conditioning coach at Clemson.

9. Terry Smith, another one of Sabrina’s brothers, was also a passenger in that car and his death came in 1997. Police said they shot him as he shouted “kill me! Kill me!” while trying to stab his estranged wife and child.

Sabrina’s family didn’t believe their account. Her father hired a lawyer to get some clarity, but they gave up their fight when they could no longer afford it.

“For them to portray him like he was trying to kill somebody or hurt somebody, of course you’re going to worry about that,” Sabrina said. “It’s pretty much we’ll never know what happened. … I do say, yeah, he wasn’t in his right state of mind. He was hurt, he was frustrated. He had called and asked Clemson can I get a job or anything down here. They pretty much told him no. He was sitting there with a college degree and not one dollar to his name.”

10. The family is filled with football players, but two that came before Hopkins took the same route to Clemson and were touched by the family’s tragic history.
Terry Smith was the first, and playing receiver, too, Robinson said the resemblance between the way the two played is uncanny. Hopkins’ siblings showed a great deal of respect for him, even though the youngest wasn’t born yet when he died. Hopkins’ sister Kesha Smith, who is 25, said his memory pushed her to work hard to get her college degree.

11. Javis Austin was the second. He sees a lot of himself at a young age in Hopkins.

But Austin became a star just after his brother Louis (one of the passengers in the wreck that killed Russell Smith) died of a heart attack.
“Losing my brother, I was 15, anyway the way he went, so quick and so fast, it was how am I going to make it? For a while I struggled but at the same time at 15, I was a 10th grader, just got moved to play running back. I became a local star. … I became well known at a time in my life when I was empty.”

That’s why his struggles in football made him want to end his life. Austin told me that if then-Clemson coach Tommy Bowden was in front of him, he would have shot him instead of himself. He took me through the day.

“That day I had skipped study hall the night before and I knew I was gonna have to face (the coaches) after already being treated unfairly several times. My car got towed the same day. I knew right then that I was going to explode on someone. I went home and sat around for a while. My roommate tried to get me to go to practice. I went outside and did target practice. My thought process was I would go in and shoot everybody. … Pulled the trigger, jumped up and looked around. I could see a little bit but I saw the cordless phone and I called 911. I stumbled to the porch, sat down and as soon as I sat down I remember hearing the EMS guys and I woke up in the hospital the next day.”

Austin said he felt relieved after he did it. He shot himself in the head and survived with damage to his eyesight.

12. Two tragedies touched Hopkins the most. His mother’s and his father’s. His mother survived hers. Ten years ago, she was attacked with a mixture of lye and bleach that left her with scars all over her face and upper body. I wrote more about the details of the attack in the story. Because the story I wrote was about Hopkins, I focused on his impact on her recovery. She had a lot of help from several family members.

Kesha Smith, her oldest who was 14 at the time, was her only child who could visit her at the hospital in Georgia where she had to stay for a month and a half.

“She wanted some Skittles,” she said. “I went to the vending machine and got some Skittles but I was just so scared to give her the Skittles. I was treating her like she was a newborn baby. In my mind I’m thinking she can’t chew, she can’t do anything. I did not want to give her skittles.”

When Sabrina returned, she stayed with her mother across the street for a while. Hopkins’ godmother, Frances Hicks, remembers the first time the rest of the kids went over to see her.

She remembers the youngest, Shanterria, saying something about Freddy Kreuger and backing away. It was especially painful for Sabrina to see her 4-year-old daughter react that way. Hopkins also spoke of the bond between the mother and youngest daughter.

“I felt bad for my little sister more than anything because she was still being raised,” Hopkins said. “… My other sister was a tomboy. My mom and my little sister, she loved her, she was just like her. I always felt bad for her because we were kind of old enough to do stuff on our own.”
Greenlee testified against Savannah Grant, the woman who attacked her. The ex-boyfriend who had cheated with Grant and was there when Greenlee was attacked, also testified against Grant. Greenlee never got apologies from either of them, but says she’s forgiven them.

13. His father’s death impacted him because of the void it created.

“He was really laid back, really nice, he treated everybody nice,” Sabrina said. “He put me on a pedestal. He treated me good. Anything I wanted I got. He was just a really good guy. … He was there for Kesha and Marcus. Christmases, birthdays, he treated them like his own. Never had a father before, so he was their father.”

It’s a small town, so Hopkins heard people saying his father was a drug dealer.

“When he got old enough to ask me, I told him the truth,” she said. “That just wasn’t something I was going to have him live with or that I feel like he needs to imitate or be like his dad.

When he asked me I told him the truth. He asked, ‘What did my daddy do? People say my dad did this.’ I said he did some illegal things, but he was a really good man. That’s what he knew when I met him, that’s what he knew all his life up until he died. He didn’t know any better. That was his normal, that’s all he knew to do ever since he was a little boy.”

She struggled to tell him more about his father because she’d only known him for three years. Hopkins’ father died when Hopkins was 5 months old. So to help, she got in touch with his family. The first time they met was at a Holiday Inn, now called the University Inn, in Clemson.